Little Labors

Most of the great women writers of the twentieth century

Most of the great women writers of the twentieth century who write or wrote in English were or are writing from England. Or from the English commonwealth. Not as much from America. Also most of the beloved mystery novels come from England. A woman I know, who writes mysteries nowadays, mysteries that are set in Saudi Arabia and often involve a female pathologist, told me, after she sold her first mystery book, that what excited her most was having sold the book to England, where they rarely buy mysteries by Americans, being so well stocked by their own. Why are the English so drawn to mysteries? I read somewhere once — with all the diagrams and tabulations organized like cavalry — that the rise of the mystery genre in England, particularly following the Industrial Revolution, coincided with increased anxiety about social mobility. The argument pointed out, among other things, that the villains in Holmes’s stories almost invariably came from the lower classes, that Moriarty (Holmes’s archnemesis) has an obviously Irish name, and that there’s something supremely comforting about pinpointing a single criminal, about being able to say of a sense of evil just generally around: Here it is, the source, we have found it. Along these lines it is also noticed that the golden age of detective novels in England followed World War I, and the golden age of detective novels in Japan followed World War II. Usually the arc of the novels was a homicide, or a short series of homicides. It makes emotional sense that, among the unmysterious deaths of millions of one’s countrymen, one might find it soothing to focus on a mysterious one or two. The theory may not quite hold water, but has at least a dense enough weave to keep in place a few oversized bouncy balls. Penelope Fitzgerald’s first novel, The Golden Child, was a murder mystery set in a museum, written to entertain her husband as he was dying. Muriel Spark’s third novel, Memento Mori, was also a murder mystery of sorts: a series of anonymous calls going out to a circle of older people, saying simply “Remember You Must Die,” which of course they nearly all do, as they are old, and murdered by time.